Oct 1999 - from Tom Crochunis to Ellen Donkin:

Ellen,
     Way back when, when you cannily dodged my petitions inviting you to participate in an email conversation for the women playwrights site, I promised I would get back to you another time. Guess what?
     I may have even suggested back then that I would be interested in writing to you and having an email conversation that would then be posted to the site about some of the kinds of performance explorations that you "wish someone would take on"—what texts, which authors, what approach to rehearsal, what styles of production, etc.—and you would speculate without any responsibility to do anything about your grandiose visions other than explain what planet they are coming from.
     So, how does that sound? Can I persuade you this time?
     I hope you are well and look forward to hearing from you.
     Best,
     Tom

Tue, 19 Oct 1999 - from Ellen Donkin to Tom Crochunis:

Tom: I would be happy to help out this time. My students and I did some work last spring looking at a video of that production of Burney's Witlings that I told you about, and part of what you realize is that the play, for all its brilliant ideas, is unfinished, overweight. Needed production. Anyway, I'll look over your email carefully this week and get back to you on Friday with some thoughts, and maybe you can tell me how the thing proceeds, if we respond to one another, and if so, who leads off. Thanks so much for being so patient. Elly

Tue, 19 Oct 1999 - from Tom Crochunis to Ellen Donkin:

Elly,
     I think that a process and pace that should work for our conversation is that you can write each Friday for the next 3-4 weeks and I'll respond sometime early the next week. You can just sketch out some ideas about production explorations you'd like to see and your thinking for choosing them and I'll ask whatever comes into my pretty little head. For instance, I'm interested by what it is that gave you the sense that the play was "unfinished, overweight." How did students react to it-either in print or on video? How did you interpret their response? What does any of this-the production, the student response to the video-say about theatre history and how it intersects with contemporary ways of encountering dramatic texts?
     Tom

Mon, 25 Oct 1999 - from Ellen Donkin to Tom Crochunis:

Tom:
     Some points that came up for us, and some answers to your questions: We saw about 40 minutes worth of videotaped production (this is the one I told you about that was directed by Kaaren Johnston at College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota.) We had also read the play, discussed it in detail, and done our own readings of the play in class. But additionally, we had just finished working on The Clandestine Marriage (a Garrick and Colman the Elder collaboration), and read The Rover, so there was some sense of a context emerging, especially with The Clandestine Marriage, in terms of how female characters get situated in dramatic texts.
     The shift from Clandestine Marriage to Witlings was startling. The female characters in CM were either young, gentle, helpless (in this case pregnant), well-born and beautiful, or they were older, post-menopausal harridans tolerated only because they wielded tremendous financial power and could make themselves obnoxious. In Witlings, the play opens in a milliners' shop, and there is some sense right away that the gravitational center of the play is in this shop, and is connected to women who make their own living and have opinions about things which they share with each other. The outside world intrudes all the time, in the form of customers, footmen, etc, but the play seemed to us to be worked around a collective protagonist, a group of working class women. Burney establishes a point of view when Censor and Dabbler come struggling into the shop and Censor says "Will you raise a fortification of caps? or barricade me with furbelows? Will you fire at me a broadside of pompons? or will you stop my retreat with a fan?" and one of the milliners, Miss Jenny, mutters: "Dear, how odd the gentleman talks!" Which seems to frame that whole other plot with Cecilia, Beaufort, Codger and Dabbler, with a kind of ironic distance before it even gets established.
     So to answer your question: It was our sense that the play establishes this wonderful alternative to the traditional plot (in which the woman is seen as barter [CM] in a financial chess game), by placing the opening scene in the hands of these women, and furthermore placing the second traditional romantic plot in an ironic context. But then the script seemed to back off a little from its initial brave commitments. The romantic plot took up an increasing amount of space, and the working women in the millinery shop seemed to get called forth mainly as support for that romantic plot, rather than having a developed plot of their own. But by that time, our commitment had been made to this first group of women, and we kept hoping for a fuller and more autonomous development of plot for them. Maybe that's what the sense of "overweight, and unfinished" came from. I'll keep thinking about it. E.

Wed, 27 Oct 1999 - from Tom Crochunis to Ellen Donkin:

E.
     Here are some further questions and thoughts. Let me know what you think:

ED wrote: Some points that came up for us, and some answers to your questions: We saw about 40 minutes worth of videotaped production (this is the one I told you about that was directed by Kaaren Johnston at College of St. Benedict.) We had also read the play, discussed it in detail, and done our own readings of the play in class. But additionally, we had just finished working on The Clandestine Marriage (a Garrick and Colman the Elder collaboration), and read The Rover, so there was some sense of a context emerging, especially with The Clandestine Marriage, in terms of how female characters get situated in dramatic texts.

How would you describe the interaction between viewing, reading, and enacting? Did they counterpoint or complement each other? What happens when contemporary bodies encounter the world of the play?

ED wrote: But additionally, we had just finished working on The Clandestine Marriage (a Garrick and Colman the Elder collaboration), and read The Rover, so there was some sense of a context emerging, especially with The Clandestine Marriage, in terms of how female characters get situated in dramatic texts.
     The shift from Clandestine Marriage to Witlings was startling. The female characters in CM were either young, gentle, helpless (in this case pregnant), well-born and beautiful, or they were older, post-menopausal harridans tolerated only because they wielded tremendous financial power and could make themselves obnoxious. In Witlings, the play opens in the Milliners shop, and there is some sense right away that the gravitational center of the play is in this shop, and is connected to women who make their own living and have opinions about things which they share with each other. The outside world intrudes all the time, in the form of customers, footmen, etc, but the play seemed to us to be worked around a collective protagonist, a group of working class women. Burney establishes a point of view when Censor and Dabbler come struggling into the shop and Censor says "Will you raise a fortification of caps? or barricade me with furbelows? Will you fire at me a broadside of pompons? or will you stop my retreat with a fan?" and one of the milliners, Miss Jenny, mutters: "Dear, how odd the gentleman talks!" Which seems to frame that whole other plot with Cecilia, Beaufort, Codger and Dabbler, with a kind of ironic distance before it even gets established.

The way you say this reminds me a bit of Taming of the Shrew with its frame....

ED wrote: So to answer your question, it was our sense that the play establishes this wonderful alternative to the traditional plot (in which the woman is seen as barter (CM) in a financial chess game), by placing the opening scene in the hands of these women, and furthermore placing the second traditional romantic plot in an ironic context. But then the script seemed to back off a little from its initial brave commitments. The romantic plot took up an increasing amount of space, and the working women in the millinery shop seemed to get called forth mainly as support for that romantic plot, rather than having a developed plot of their own. But by that time, our commitment had been made to this first group of women, and we kept hoping for a fuller and more autonomous development of plot for them. Maybe that's what the sense of "overweight, and unfinished" came from. I'll keep thinking about it. E.

Your description of the play's sequence raises interesting questions about how emphasis works in the chronology of a staging. I wonder, for example, whether/how the original frame of the play gets reactivated later after it's moved into the background. Do reading and staging reveal the play differently in this case? Is the flavor of the opening more enduring when staged than when read?
     Okay, back to you?
     Tom

Sat, 30 Oct 1999 - from Ellen Donkin to Tom Crochunis:

Tom: I got your questions—I'm chewing on them and I'll be back to you, hopefully tomorrow (Sunday, Halloween—the high holidays around here). I realized as I reread my stuff how much I love this play and how anxious it makes me to criticize it publicly—I hope it doesn't get read as a dismissal. I can't complain about what she wrote without feeling protective of it in equal measures. Oh, that Frances... El

Fri, 14 Jan 2000 - from Ellen Donkin to Tom Crochunis:

Tom: I've just gone back to my tape of the production.
     I'm thinking through your questions, and what I take you to mean here is how production (contemporary theatre production, contemporary theatre production archivally recorded on video, contemporary staged reading, and staged reading in the 18th century) might have importance for reception. I remembered as I reread your questions how the play got read out loud by Frances' family after dinner one night, and there was a kind of momentum and hilarity that come undoubtedly with recognition and privacy (in other words, they knew these characterizations to be satires of people whom Doody identifies as patrons of Frances's father, the musicologist Dr. Charles Burney). So part of the pleasure perhaps, in this first reading, was that it was a venue for covert satire of people they would all have been duty-bound to treat with the utmost formality and respect. Not to mention the fact that it was a family gathering, with whatever complicated networks of support or critique that might have entailed for Frances. Sometimes your family is your most candid critic, although it would probably be fair to say that none of them, even Charles Burney himself who had written music for the London theatre, were "expert" on how seaworthy this play would be in the context of full production. Here Sheridan, Garrick and Colman were excellent judges on just how long a scene could be sustained, where a character needed another scene in order to fully justify a later plot development, how to shift narrative language into dramatic dialogue, etc.
     Now, if I shift gears a moment over to the St. Benedict production, which was 1996, a couple of things come into focus as interesting points of comparison. First of all, we have no 18th century baseline for production. Nobody produced this play in its own era; it got shelved at Dr. Burney's panicked request. So to the extent that any play during this period would have gotten read and revised by the current manager before getting submitted first to the censor and then to the cast for rehearsal, this one didn't. Consequently we have no fingerprints on the play other than Frances Burney's that might give us some clues about how they might have read this play with 18th century production in mind. And as we know, often a new play went all the way through opening night, and got revised again that first week, based on audience response, and where it became clear there were places where their attention went slack or they laughed inappropriately. Without a doubt, any critique of this script by us is hampered by the fact that a contemporary sensibility, mine or my students, or for that matter the producers and designers and director of the St.Benedict production, is shaped by whatever constitutes pace and aesthetic response in the 1990's-2000's. That inevitably brings film and television into play, and all the ways in which attention gets manipulated in those media. The situation is made even more complex by the fact that the archival tape of the staged version at St. Benedict is now seen by us on a video monitor; rightly or wrongly, that monitor invokes expectations connected to television. And as I said before, we are making judgements about a script that is terra incognita anyway because of never having been professionally produced in its own period. So our magisterial judgements about the script being "unfinished, overweight" have to be pretty scrupulously contextualized.
     Another layer of complexity: the St. Benedict production made an interesting design choice, which was to use period costumes and wigs, but to stage the play in front of several large painted units that created a visual counterpoint to the action by invoking Burney's biography, her contemporaries, and her family with greatly enlarged images that looked to be painted on free-standing flats. There were also wings with enlarged 18th century writing on them, and some step units that were definitely not period, along with a circular center stage which may have been a revolve. The costumes and wigs in particular, as I am remembering my talks with the director, had been painstakingly researched, especially in view of the fact that the play was about milliners to begin with. The deliberate disparity between set and costumes may have been intended to create a critical distance in the audience, which may have contributed to how we entered into a critique of the play as a group.
     But we read it aloud, among ourselves, before seeing it on video and so our response to the script came from this sequence: reading it alone (albeit in the context of other period plays by men and women); reading it as a staged reading to one another, and seeing it on the video screen. My guess is that because the course had made a case for female subjectivity as being one of the ways we recognized a play written by a woman (even if the main characters were men in order to meet perceived market demand) that Burney's script in the first act set into motion certain expectations and hopes that ultimately were not met. The subjectivity that is awarded to the working women milliners at the beginning of the play simply doesn't develop. This may be Burney's own effort to meet market demand by investing herself in the romantic plot after setting up this initial scenario with working women, and certainly she revisits it later in the play (beginning of Act V). But I suspect we had our hopes pinned on having the sensibilities and humor and resilience of these working women come more fully into focus, and in fact they move into the background once the romantic plot picks up steam. That was the substance for the charge of "unfinished;" I think it had to do with our expectations based on the opening scene.
     The charge of "overweight" was a growing sense, as we read the play out loud, that she had grafted two different genres together, one the genre that she had inherited which included the romantic plot, and the other the genre that she reinvented to suit her own needs (what to call it? working class situation, comic, a sense of a collective protagonist more than a single person). These two genres, if we can call them that, collide at the beginning of Act V when Cecilia, a refugee from the romantic plot, comes into the millinery shop looking woebegone and pathetic because her romance (and her aspirations to wealth and security) are collapsing; and she stands in stark contrast to these women who are working and taking care of themselves. But our concern was that these working women hadn't been developed enough to keep a firm grip on the gravitational center of the play. So we see the contrast without being able to fully make a moral judgement about what the contrast means, if you see what I mean. Maybe as I think about it, what we were complaining about was that the romantic plot was overweight, and that we would have preferred to see it as the counterpoint. Instead, the milliners became the counterpoint, and the romantic couple became the gravitational center.
     The St. Benedict production made a very interesting decision to use the assembled voices of the cast to chorally "narrate" the play in certain moments, and soonce again, in addition to design choices, the production gave us a way to look at the play from the outside, and made room for our own (sometimes critical) contemporary sensibilities. A production in which all aspects moved in the direction of authenticity (i.e. "authentic" reproduction) probably would not have made room for our critical reaction to the script in quite the same way. We were, from the outset, determined to champion Frances Burney's play, especially given the odds she was contending with (her father and Samuel Crisp) and the fact that it had been solicited by Sheridan and then never gotten produced. We also knew something of her life, as a novelist and a playwright, and also as a woman. Our sense of expectation was very high. It was in the context of this kind of entry into her world that we read the play and realized, with a certain shock, that she was a young woman in her twenties with no first-hand experience of theatre at all. Given the smallest amount of encouragement, and our experience of this first script (which in places is just breathtakingly funny and stageworthy) we felt she could have accomplished anything. But that the Witlings was a brilliant first effort that would have benefitted from production.
     Or maybe not.... It perhaps could be equally argued that major revisions (especially from someone like Thomas Harris) could have materially injured (i.e., neutralized) the originality of the play, and that what we have in the surviving script is like petrified wood. We see all the layers before someone got in and turned them into chipboard. I had never thought of this before; that in fact, by escaping production this script of hers gives us a very important window into how innovative she might have been under other circumstances.
     I'm going to reread the script and look again at my original message to you and see if I buy my own arguments! Take care, Elly

Fri, 21 Jan 2000 - from Tom Crochunis to Ellen Donkin:

Elly,

ED wrote: I'm thinking through your questions, and what I take you to mean here is how production (contemporary theatre production, contemporary theatre production archivally recorded on video, contemporary staged reading, and staged reading in the 18th century) might have importance for reception. I remembered as I reread your questions how the play got read out loud by Frances' family after dinner one night, and there was a kind of momentum and hilarity that come undoubtedly with recognition and privacy (in other words, they knew these characterizations to be satires of people whom Doody identifies as patrons of Frances's father, the musicologist Dr. Charles Burney). So part of the pleasure perhaps, in this first reading, was that it was a venue for covert satire of people they would all have been duty-bound to treat with the utmost formality and respect. Not to mention the fact that it was a family gathering, with whatever complicated networks of support or critique that might have entailed for Frances. Sometimes your family is your most candid critic, although it would probably be fair to say that none of them, even Charles Burney himself who had written music for the London theatre, were "expert" on how seaworthy this play would be in the context of full production. Here Sheridan, Garrick and Colman were excellent judges on just how long a scene could be sustained, where a character needed another scene in order to fully justify a later plot development, how to shift narrative language into dramatic dialogue, etc.

The story about the reception history of Burney's play is wonderful. It seems so important as a salient piece of evidence about the play's complex "performability" and also raises all kinds of questions about what we even mean by such a term. Maybe we should always look at various different kinds of "performance" of a play alongside one another—reviews of the published text, theatre reviews, responses to the play within the theatre company or the family of the author. If we did so, there might be less of the bottom line assumptions about what constitutes "performability."

ED wrote: Now, if I shift gears a moment over to the St. Benedict production, which was 1996, a couple of things come into focus as interesting points of comparison. First of all, we have no 18th century baseline for production. Nobody produced this play in its own era; it got shelved at Dr. Burney's panicked request. So to the extent that any play during this period would have gotten read and revised by the current manager before getting submitted first to the censor and then to the cast for rehearsal, this one didn't. Consequently we have no fingerprints on the play other than Frances Burney's that might give us some clues about how they might have read this play with 18th century production in mind. And as we know, often a new play went all the way through opening night, and got revised again that first week, based on audience response, and where it became clear there were places where their attention went slack or they laughed inappropriately. Without a doubt, any critique of this script by us is hampered by the fact that a contemporary sensibility, mine or my students, or for that matter the producers and designers and director of the St.Benedict production, is shaped by whatever constitutes pace and aesthetic response in the 1990's-2000's. That inevitably brings film and television into play, and all the ways in which attention gets manipulated in those media. The situation is made even more complex by the fact that the archival tape of the staged version at St. Benedict is now seen by us on a video monitor; rightly or wrongly, that monitor invokes expectations connected to television. And as I said before, we are making judgements about a script that is terra incognita anyway because of never having been professionally produced in its own period. So our magisterial judgements about the script being "unfinished, overweight" have to be pretty scrupulously contextualized.

I think the significance of what you're pointing to here is often missed. I mean, people could not help but agree with you, I suspect, since how can we argue with the cultural specificity of our frames of reference, particularly when it comes to plays that are being looked at seriously—perhaps for the first time—through these frames. But I think that the implications of what you're pointing to are really potentially earth-shattering for historiographic work and for discussions of how we decide what to teach, what pedagogies to employ, and what performance—especially in an educational setting—is for.
     I mean, if we consider your point seriously, then the very purposes of teaching dramatic writing in the context of the literature or theatre classroom would need to become much more self-reflexive. So, rather than asking what plays matter (given the degree to which all manner of cultural bias and social constraint must be swallowed and replicated to even begin to answer that question the way curriculum typically does), we might need to be willing to engage in much more self-conscious pedagogical performances and text selections, choosing to look at a play like Burney's in relation to the frames of reference you mention, asking how the media structures we have internalized lead us to read the play, where those structures connect to social and cultural frames of reference that may or may not have actually influenced (through a complex chain of lineage) how Burney's play was both constructed (in the absence of actual production rewriting) and received in its own time. I mean, when you read Baillie's critical discourses as in some ways aware of the cinematic in the theatre of her time, you have a justification for seeing Burney's dramaturgy in relation to our own contemporary cinematic structures of response. Anyway, I'm going on, but I think that you have really opened a wonderful can of worms here through how you speculate about what influenced the way Burney's play looked now.
     If you were to ask students to do something exploratory to try to experience these frames of reference, how might you get them to see themselves seeing the play? What if they created story boards of certain sections to force the play into cinematic structures? Is there a way you might use performance work to bring them in touch with the constraints placed on them by their ways of reading the play through contemporary lenses?

ED wrote: Another layer of complexity: the St. Benedict production made an interesting design choice, which was to use period costumes and wigs, but to stage the play in front of several large painted units that created a visual counterpoint to the action by invoking Burney's biography, her contemporaries, and her family with greatly enlarged images that looked to be painted on free-standing flats. There were also wings with enlarged 18th century writing on them, and some step units that were definitely not period, along with a circular center stage which may have been a revolve. The costumes and wigs in particular, as I am remembering my talks with the director, had been painstakingly researched, especially in view of the fact that the play was about milliners to begin with. The deliberate disparity between set and costumes may have been intended to create a critical distance in the audience, which may have contributed to how we entered into a critique of the play as a group.
     But we read it aloud, among ourselves, before seeing it on video and so our response to the script came from this sequence: reading it alone (albeit in the context of other period plays by men and women); reading it as a staged reading to one another, and seeing it on the video screen. My guess is that because the course had made a case for female subjectivity as being one of the ways we recognized a play written by a woman (even if the main characters were men in order to meet perceived market demand) that Burney's script in the first act set into motion certain expectations and hopes that ultimately were not met. The subjectivity that is awarded to the working women milliners at the beginning of the play simply doesn't develop. This may be Burney's own effort to meet market demand by investing herself in the romantic plot after setting up this initial scenario with working women, and certainly she revisits it later in the play (beginning of Act V). But I suspect we had our hopes pinned on having the sensibilities and humor and resilience of these working women come more fully into focus, and in fact they move into the background once the romantic plot picks up steam. That was the substance for the charge of "unfinished;" I think it had to do with our expectations based on the opening scene.

You point to ways that pedagogy itself provides another crucial framing lens that deserves to be reflected upon as a contemporary way of seeing the play. What I'm really struck by here, too, is that we might be able to say that our expectation of the kind of "subjectivity" you mention is conditioned by the greater familiarity to contemporary readers of genres other than drama (the novel, Romantic poetry, film?) or of a dramatic style that itself addressed a cultural audience accustomed to the subjectivities of these other genres. This possibility seems particularly weird because, of course, Burney herself is best known as a novelist who had something to do with this history. All this is to say that our frames of reference are historically related to the storytelling strategies in relation to which Burney was writing.
     So, what's my question? Well, how would talking about novels and their ways of engaging us influence how students might be asked to reflect on their responses to Burney's play? Or, alternatively, how might Romantic poetry's frames of reference (and here I mean either the poetry of Hemans or Wordsworth) be juxtaposed with what the play both does and doesn't do?

ED wrote: The St. Benedict production made a very interesting decision to use the assembled voices of the cast to chorally "narrate" the play in certain moments, and so once again, in addition to design choices, the production gave us a way to look at the play from the outside, and made room for our own (sometimes critical) contemporary sensibilities. A production in which all aspects moved in the direction of authenticity (i.e. "authentic" reproduction) probably would not have made room for our critical reaction to the script in quite the same way.

This last statement is very, very interesting. Could you say a little more about this and how you think this strategy of "'authentic' reproduction" might affect contemporary response? Is there a parallel in critical response and its inhibition by certain strategies of historiography? Is there a case to be made for a deliberately inauthentic or performative historiography? Is that something that has been articulated well by anyone to your knowledge? (Sorry, this is a huge topic I'm throwing at you....)

ED wrote: We were, from the outset, determined to champion Frances Burney's play, especially given the odds she was contending with (her father and Samuel Crisp) and the fact that it had been solicited by Sheridan and then never gotten produced. We also knew something of her life, as a novelist and a playwright, and also as a woman. Our sense of expectation was very high. It was in the context of this kind of entry into her world that we read the play and realized, with a certain shock, that she was a young woman in her twenties with no first-hand experience of theatre at all. Given the smallest amount of encouragement, and our experience of this first script (which in places is just breathtakingly funny and stageworthy) we felt she could have accomplished anything. But that the Witlings was a brilliant first effort that would have benefitted from production.
     Or maybe not.... It perhaps could be equally argued that major revisions (especially from someone like Thomas Harris) could have materially injured (i.e., neutralized) the originality of the play, and that what we have in the surviving script is like petrified wood. We see all the layers before someone got in and turned them into chipboard. I had never thought of this before; that in fact, by escaping production this script of hers gives us a very important window into how innovative she might have been under other circumstances.

And so, our slightly querulous response to a woman writer's play might signal our registering the ways in which she was not incorporated into traditions we have internalized. Or, put another way, a writer's unhomogenized aesthetic tastes funny to us.
     Closet drama (broadly conceived to include anything that wasn't staged in the public theatres), then, provides a crucial countertext to the performance tradition, not just for what might only have been expressed there but also as the double of the traditions of stage dramaturgy.
     If this is so, then plays that were never adapted to the rigors of stage success constitute evidence of counter-aesthetics (either idiosyncratically individual or deliberately oppositional... on some continuum between these) and might provide crucial evidence, by contrast, with the dramaturgies we have learned to value in school.
     Is there a case to be made for these "marginal" texts as one of the best avenues for access to both the structures and practices of "the dramatic tradition" as well as to the responses to that tradition that have emerged from particular writers in particular contexts? It sounds to me like maybe the answer is yes and that the study of Sheridan or Inchbald is really best undertaken alongside a study of Burney's unperformed plays.
     As you can see, I really got excited by some of the things you wrote about. Feel free to take or leave whatever leads interest you.
     Best,
     Tom

Fri, 4 Feb 2000 - from Ellen Donkin to Tom Crochunis:

TC wrote: The story about the reception history of Burney's play is wonderful. It seems so important as a salient piece of evidence about the play's complex "performability" and also raises all kinds of questions about what we even mean by such a term. Maybe we should always look at various different kinds of "performance" of a play alongside one another—reviews of the published text, theatre reviews, responses to the play within the theatre company or the family of the author. If we did so, there might be less of the bottom line assumptions about what constitutes "performability."

Just a thought in response to your comments here. The work with Tracy [Davis] on the nineteenth-century women playwrights [volume of essays] had exactly that effect on me, i.e. I came away with fewer "bottom-line assumptions about what constituted performability." It's an important reminder for me too, because I often cite Garrick and Colman (et al) as authorities on the subject of performability, which indeed they were, but only for those professional theatres and those audiences. Your idea of "comparative studies" of performability opens up the possibility of legitimizing other venues, something that probably has to happen if women playwrights in history are going to come into focus anyway.

TC wrote: I think the significance of what you're pointing to here is often missed. I mean, people could not help but agree with you, I suspect, since how can we argue with the cultural specificity of our frames of reference, particularly when it comes to plays that are being looked at seriously—perhaps for the first time—through these frames. But I think that the implications of what you're pointing to are really potentially earth-shattering for historiographic work and for discussions of how we decide what to teach, what pedagogies to employ, and what performance—especially in an educational setting—is for.
     I mean, if we consider your point seriously, then the very purposes of teaching dramatic writing in the context of the literature or theatre classroom would need to become much more self-reflexive. So, rather than asking what plays matter (given the degree to which all manner of cultural bias and social constraint must be swallowed and replicated to even begin to answer that question the way curriculum typically does), we might need to be willing to engage in much more self-conscious pedagogical performances and text selections, choosing to look at a play like Burney's in relation to the frames of reference you mention, asking how the media structures we have internalized lead us to read the play, where those structures connect to social and cultural frames of reference that may or may not have actually influenced (through a complex chain of lineage) how Burney's play was both constructed (in the absence of actual production rewriting) and received in its own time. I mean, when you read Baillie's critical discourses as in some ways aware of the cinematic in the theatre of her time, you have a justification for seeing Burney's dramaturgy in relation to our own contemporary cinematic structures of response. Anyway, I'm going on, but I think that you have really opened a wonderful can of worms here through how you speculate about what influenced the way Burney's play looked now.
     If you were to ask students to do something exploratory to try to experience these frames of reference, how might you get them to see themselves seeing the play? What if they created story boards of certain sections to force the play into cinematic structures? Is there a way you might use performance work to bring them in touch with the constraints placed on them by their ways of reading the play through contemporary lenses?

It has honestly never occurred to me to plow into a self-reflexive enterprise of this kind. Like so many of us, I've always covertly imagined that studying theatre was in some sense competitive with studying the media. Or at least was deliberately marking itself as "other territory." What you suggest here, by implication, is that theatre in their context and maybe even in our own is the media, and could even be argued to be mass media, given the number of performances vs. the number of citizens in London in a given year. This makes me think that weaving these two together more consciously serves both areas of study better. I always pass out a xeroxed copy of the Morning Chronicle, March something, 1779, and ask the students to tell me what they notice. It's stunning for them and for me to discover, again and again, that when Frances Burney was writing her very first plays, theatre listings were on the front page of the morning paper. I can't get over it. Doesn't that say something about how we might reposition theatre in our courses, not as a kind of fossil fuel, but as something that participates and indeed is subject to the aesthetic judgements that have developed as a consequence of other activities, like mass media?

TC wrote: You point to ways that pedagogy itself provides another crucial framing lens that deserves to You point to ways that pedagogy itself provides another crucial framing lens that deserves to be reflected upon as a contemporary way of seeing the play. What I'm really struck by here, too, is that we might be able to say that our expectation of the kind of "subjectivity" you mention is conditioned by the greater familiarity to contemporary readers of genres other than drama (the novel, Romantic poetry, film?) or of a dramatic style that itself addressed a cultural audience accustomed to the subjectivities of these other genres. This possibility seems particularly weird because, of course, Burney herself is best known as a novelist who had something to do with this history. All this is to say that our frames of reference are historically related to the storytelling strategies in relation to which Burney was writing.
     So, what's my question? Well, how would talking about novels and their ways of engaging us influence how students might be asked to reflect on their responses to Burney's play? Or, alternatively, how might Romantic poetry's frames of reference (and here I mean either the poetry of Hemans or Wordsworth) be juxtaposed with what the play both does and doesn't do?

I take your question here to be how an eighteenth or nineteenth reader/auditor would themselves have been conditioned by exposure in other genres. And that we might condition our students by systematically exposing them to what else people were reading, talking about, seeing during the decade, so that they (the students) begin to take in the play with the same kind of conditioning a reader or audience member might have had during the period itself. It seems to me absolutely true that we tend as a whole to teach genres separate from one another, when in fact they were not experienced separately from one another, not by the public during the period, and not by the author/playwrights themselves, who—as you point out about Burney—were themselves moving back and forth in whatever genre would have them at a given moment. We probably teach to our own strengths—lean in the direction of whichever genre we have been trained in—rather than biting off a more interdisciplinary range of writings and performance experiences in order to catch a fuller sense not only of what a given play was about, but also how that play would have been received.
     I'm thinking as I write about what a course like that might include; it would also need attention to history itself, and to the way history emerges in those newspapers (the reports from Parliament are one kind of information, but the small articles and advertisements are marvelously revealing of who was starving to death, what was getting imported from Africa, the cost of dance classes, etc.) And wouldn't the reading of novels sharpen our sense of how the gender debates were developing in other forms? The idea is to become a better "reader" of theatre scripts, rather than dragging our 21^st century assumptions with us about what constitutes good theatre backwards into the eighteenth century. But by extension, we also raise the question here about how 18^th century theatre got judged in an eighteenth century context. And presumably that means not only absorbing critical essays from the period, but figuring out how, at a more subliminal level, playwrights and theatre-goers were bringing with them expectations from other genres that they themselves were not conscious of.

TC wrote: This last statement is very, very interesting. Could you say a little more about this and how you think this strategy of "'authentic' reproduction" might affect contemporary response? Is there a parallel in critical rmsponse and its inhibition by certain strategies of historiography? Is there a case to be made for a deliberately inauthentic or performative historiography? Is that something that has been articulated well by anyone to your knowledge? (Sorry, this is a huge topic I'm throwing at you....)

I think performance studies is increasingly becoming interested in working with historical materials from earlier centuries. I'm just reflecting what I've heard at conferences and through the grapevine; there may very well be something in print. A deliberately inauthentic performance (the word makes me nervous, but maybe "historical reproduction" would be more accurate?) would seem to invite our participation and our commentary, rather than our respectful witnessing of a cultural artifact. The problem, I think, is that the object all sublime, at least for me, is to experience recognition in these theatrical moments, rather than estrangement and distance. Somehow the strategies for creating deliberate inauthenticity have to be managed with great care, so that we don't lose our sense of connection to character. If that can be maintained, then as an audience, we attach ourselves to the texture and vitality of familiar character ground and because of the security of that grounding, are able to enter into a much fuller sense of the character's world (which, as a scholar of Greek history and literature once said to me, is nothing but strange—whether you are talking about press gangs in the eighteenth or gladiators during the Roman empire). It may be that the gaps are so huge, from epoch to epoch, that we cannot "reproduce" an earlier epoch without leaving room somewhere in the production design for a contemporary sensibility (20^th or 21^st century) to root itself. The alternative is the kind of production that attempts to naturalize everything and runs the risk of camp. The issue for me is how we locate ourselves and our audiences inside historical texts. The text itself only had its own contemporary audience in mind; we bring different baggage to the experience.
     The more I think about it, the more I wonder if our pleasure and investment as a class in the Witlings wasn't a function of everything else we had read and discussed prior to that play (it came late in the course). It was as if we had worked to acclimate ourselves to the world in which the play was written. But that's almost never a possibility for people who are simply filing into a theatre after a long day's work (a day replete with cell phones, computers and cars) and have to find some way to either enter into the world of the play, or let it slip by them entirely. To the extent that audiences are able to locate themselves in that world, and have the confidence to name certain aspects of that world as strange and others as familiar, would seem to me to be no small achievement. Maybe that's what you mean by performative historiography: there's an enactment which is itself a lesson in how to read history, in how we take it in, and why it's important (because it's us).

TC wrote: And so, our slightly querulous response to a woman writer's play might signal our registering the ways in which she was not incorporated into traditions we have internalized. Or, put another way, a writer's unhomogenized aesthetic tastes funny to us.
     Closet drama (broadly conceived to include anything that wasn't staged in the public theatres), then, provides a crucial countertext to the performance tradition, not just for what might only have been expressed there but also as the double of the traditions of stage dramaturgy.
     If this is so, then plays that were never adapted to the rigors of stage success constitute evidence of counter-aesthetics (either idiosyncratically individual or deliberately oppositional... on some continuum between these) and might provide crucial evidence, by contrast, with the dramaturgies we have learned to value in school.
     Is there a case to be made for these "marginal" texts as one of the best avenues for access to both the structures and practices of "the dramatic tradition" as well as to the responses to that tradition that have emerged from particular writers in particular contexts? It sounds to me like maybe the answer is yes and that the study of Sheridan or Inchbald is really best undertaken alongside a study of Burney's unperformed plays.

Yes. Yes. Yes. This is another moment in which I realize I have wasted critical amounts of energy and cunning trying to defend women against attacks that they were unproduceable (Baillie, for example) or theatrically illiterate. I love your ideas of reading these plays against the produced ones that were deemed stageworthy. I've been rereading Austen, and I was thinking last night about Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, and how critical she is of one of the men who doesn't read well aloud—she complains that his ineptitude is enough to kill any romantic interest. It got me thinking about production—what might it be like to stage one of these closet dramas on its own terms? Has anyone done productions in the circumstances we imagine they were produced in originally? I'll stop here—I have to run to a production of Hamlet—a student production, and it's absolutely packed, night after night. Something keeps bringing them back—
     Elly

This conversation is the beginning of what we hope will be an ongoing thread of discussion at the BWP1800 site. If any of the ideas offered here stir your thinking, write to the site and we'll post your remarks in order to continue the conversation.

Ellen Donkin and Thomas C. Crochunis

Ellen Donkin is Professor of Theatre at Hampshire College. She is the author of Upstaging Big Daddy (co-ed. with Susan Clement;U Michigan P, 1993) and Getting into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776-1829 (Routledge, 1995). She is also co-editor (with Tracy C. Davis) of Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge UP, 1999). She has published numerous essays on women's theatre history.

Thomas C. Crochunis heads the publications department at the U.S. Department of Education research laboratory at Brown University. He is editing Joanna Baillie, Romantic Dramatist: Critical Essays, a volume of essays on Baillie's plays and dramaturgy (Gordon and Breach, forthcoming). In 1998, he was guest editor of a special issue of Romanticism on the Net on British Women Playwrights around 1800. He is also co-founder (with Michael Eberle-Sinatra) of the Web-based working group on British Women Playwrights around 1800.